When whales attack: the horrific truth about Moby-Dick

Two thousand miles from the nearest land, the crew of the Essex watched in horror as the enormous bull whale headed for their mother ship. Marooned in small, open boats the 20 men stood, powerless, as the creature struck their vessel at full speed.

Wood splintered, the whole structure of the ship shook. Then, after swimming off to leeward, the whale gathered its strength and came thundering towards the Essex again, even faster than before. As the crew floundered in the middle of the Pacific they knew their lives were in danger. None, though, was prepared for the appalling choices they were going to have to make in the days and weeks that followed.

The story of the Essex and the lengths to which its crew went in order to survive is part of maritime lore and the subject of the new film In the Heart of the Sea, dramatising the real-life voyage that inspired Herman Melville to write his novel Moby-Dick. Starring Chris Hemsworth, best known for playing Thor in the Avengers movies, In the Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard, attempts to be both an action-packed drama and a disturbing portrayal of the human response to extreme hunger.

In the early 19th century, whaling was probably the most unpleasant, dangerous and least rewarded of all occupations. A whaler’s life was mired in blood and blubber, stalled by immense periods of boredom and often abruptly curtailed by violent death. Signing on for a whaling voyage could mean up to five years away from home, and a journey to the other end of the Earth, in order to do battle with the great leviathan of the seas – the sperm whale.

Ever since 1712, when they had first set out from Nantucket, Yankee whalers had supplied the Western world with whale oil. The streets of London, New York, Berlin and Paris were lit by it; the mills and machinery of the Industrial Revolution ran on the same stuff. Whaleships were the equivalent of modern oil tankers, earning millions of dollars for the new republic and exporting its influence around the world.

It was this heroic, filthy, abusive and highly lucrative (for its shipowners) business that Melville recorded in Moby-Dick. Published in 1851,his bookwas wildly digressive; 135 chapters filled with everything he knew about whales and whaling – a result of his own whaling voyages in the 1840s.

But much more than that, Moby-Dick became a kind of modern American myth, woven around the legendary battle between man and whale, incarnate in the figure of Captain Ahab. The monomaniacal commander of the Pequod goes in search of the fantastical White Whale which had “dismasted” him, biting off his leg. Now Ahab scours the South Seas, seeking revenge on the gigantic creature. To land-bound readers of Moby-Dick, it must have seemed a far-fetched, if thrilling, tale. Could a whale really attack and sink a great ship, as Moby Dick does in the final, apocalyptic chapters of Melville’s book? The astonishing answer was yes. And not only that, the gruesome details of the true story exceeded any fictional account.

Even now, the story depicted in In the Heart of The Sea seems unbelievable. But for a first-hand account of those events, we can turn to the words of the men who lived through them – and survived to tell the tale.

On August 12 1819, the Essex, an 87ft, 238-ton whaleship, set sail from Nantucket. The captain was George Pollard, a man whose subsequent experiences were destined to haunt him as much as his fictional counterpart Ahab, while his first mate, Owen Chase, became the role model for Ahab’s first mate, Starbuck (although better known now for the global chain of coffee shops named after him).

By November 1820, the Essex had reached the Pacific equator, 2,000 miles from the South American coast. The voyage had been uneventful – until now. That morning, November 20, the weather was fine and clear. A pod of whales was sighted by the lookout. The men set to with gusto – whales meant dollars, after all. The slender, fast, clinker-built whaleboats, built to ride high in the water, were lowered from the sides of the ship, and the hunters set off in pursuit of their prey.

The sperm whale is no mean adversary. It is the largest predator that ever lived, and although modern sperm whales grow to only 65ft, Melville and his fellow whalers recorded whales 80 or even 100ft long. (Scientists think intensive hunting in the 19th century reduced the number of very large bull sperm whales, thereby affecting the overall size of the population, genetically. Hunting has also reduced the world population from 1.6 million to fewer than 360,000.)

Armed with a lower jaw studded with 42 teeth, it’s a formidable opponent if driven to defend itself. Its tail, as broad as a house, could dash a flimsy whaleboat to smithereens, and often did. The sperm whale is also the only cetacean that can swallow a human being, and, again, has done so, albeit by accident, in the melee of a hunt. (It’s not a nice way to go: its gastric juices are so acidic that sailors cut out of whales have been bleached white by the process.)

Yet this mammal is also highly social, sentient and communicative – it posseses the largest brain in nature. And despite its size and power, it is extraordinarily placid, timid, even. I’ve made a special study of the whale, in the writing of my books, Leviathan and The Sea Inside, and can attest to its overwhelmingly pacific nature. But then, I’ve never come at one with a harpoon.

The voyage of the whaling ship Essex

The crew of the Essex set upon the pod. Owen Chase, at the prow of the whaleboat, threw his weapon into a whale. “Feeling the harpoon in him, he threw himself, in agony, over towards the boat and, giving a severe blow with his tail, struck the boat,” Chase wrote in an account published in 1821. Realising that if he didn’t act quickly, the whale might drag them down, Chase took an axe and cut the line.

At the same time, Captain Pollard was in his whaleboat, attempting to harpoon another large whale. But then, to his amazement, Chase saw, much closer in, “a very large spermaceti whale about 85ft in length” heading directly at their mother ship, “as if fired with revenge” for the sufferings of its fellow whales.

Chase watched, horrified, as the whale “came down upon us at full speed, and struck the ship with his head, just forward of the fore-chains; he gave us such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces. The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock, and trembled for a few seconds like a leaf.”

Even the whale appeared to have been dazed by the blow. It lay motionless, briefly, before making off to leeward. But then it “started off with great velocity”, Chase reported, “coming down apparently with twice his ordinary speed, and with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect”. Its jaws were snapping together, and the surf flew as it thrashed the water with its tail.

The largest brain in nature: a white sperm whale

I’ve seen sperm whales snap their jaws this way – it’s usually a sign of stress. I’ve also been warned off from getting too close by the thundering slap of their muscular tails, usually because they were protecting a young calf. Indeed, contemporary whale scientist Prof Hal Whitehead has speculated that the whale that attacked the Essex was defending its own young – it was a characteristic, cruel tactic of whalers to harpoon calves, in order to bring the more valuable adults within range. Having said this, there are few incidents of sperm whales attacking ships; one of the only other recorded incidents was the one on the whaleship Ann Alexander in 1851, 31 years after the attack on the Essex.

Whatever the motive of this seeming monster, it rammed the ship with its head for a second time. This sickening blow was fatal for the vessel – with the sea gushing in its side, it was clear that the Essex was sinking. Pollard, who had now returned to his stricken vessel, cried, “My God, Mr Chase, what is the matter?” “We have been stove by a whale,” came the answer.

Hurriedly, the crew, all 20 of them, took to the three remaining whaleboats. As the Essex sank, they rescued what they could: 6lb of hard bread; three casks of water; a musket, powder, tools; “and a few turtles”. Chase also managed to salvage his sea chest – and with it, precious paper and pencil with which he would record their ordeal.

Cillian Murphy, left, as Matthew Joy and Chris Hemsworth as Owen Chase, in In the Heart of the SeaCredit:
Warner Bros. Pictures

They also saved navigational materials – but it was in using these that Pollard and Chase made their great mistake. They found that the nearest inhabited islands were the Marquesas, to the west. But they feared that their natives were cannibals, and so decided to try the longer route, eastwards, to Chile. It was a terrible irony, given what happened next.

Having fashioned sails, they set off in three boats. They were at the mercy of currents and winds; often they drifted, lost on the infinite sea. Chase calculated that their food would last 60 days – but the bread got soaked and, once dried, its saltiness merely increased the men’s thirst. At night the boats would drift apart in the darkness, desperately signalling to each other with lanterns. Suddenly, on December 20, a month after they had been wrecked, they sighted land, “a blessed vision like a basking paradise before our longing eyes”, as Chase put it.

But Henderson Island was no tropical paradise. It contained little fresh water and they had soon killed all the birds they found, so on December 26 they decided to try to reach South America – now 3,000 miles distant. Three men decided to stay on the island and take their chances there.

Their fellow sailors were soon far out at sea. Burnt by the blazing sun during the day, at night sharks swam about the boat, snapping as if to “devour the very wood”. With only three days’ food left, extreme hunger was depriving the men of their “speech and reason”, wrote Chase. They reconciled themselves to the inevitable. “The black man, Richard Paterson, was perfectly ready to die.” He did so of his own accord: six of the Essex’s crew were African-American, and none would survive.

A leather sea chest, thought to have belonged to first mate Owen Chase

But as Paterson’s body was committed to the deep, Chase realised that they couldn’t afford to jettison such a source of sustenance again. As the next man, Isaac Cole, succumbed to madness and death – dying “in the most horrible and frightful convulsions I have ever witnessed” – the decision was made to eat him. Cole’s body was dismembered, the flesh cut from his bones. They sliced open his trunk and took out his heart.

“We now commenced to satisfy the immediate cravings of nature from the heart, which we eagerly devoured, and then ate sparingly of a few pieces of the flesh,” Chase wrote. The rest they cut into strips and hung up to dry for future consumption. They even roasted their victim’s organs on a fire made on a stone at the bottom of the boat. Chase and the remaining crew had been reduced to savages, ironically more than any Pacific islander they had sought to avoid.

Their boat had become a charnel house: “We knew not then to whose lot it would fall next, either to die or be shot, and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.” With morbid practicality, Chase worked out a gruesome formula: three men could live for seven days off one human corpse.

By now, the three boats had become separated. One drifted off and was never heard of again. In Captain Pollard’s boat three men died; all were eaten; all were black. After this, the white men began drawing lots and Pollard was forced to watch as his own young nephew, Owen Coffin, drew the black dot. Bowing to his fate, Coffin lay down his head on the gunwale, was shot, and consumed.

Benjamin Walker as George Pollard in In the Heart of the SeaCredit:
Warner Bros. Pictures

Cannibalism had saved the Essex’s survivors. But at a price. On February 18, after almost three months at sea, Chase’s boat sighted a sail – a London brig, the Indian. Their rescuers were shocked at what they found, said Chase: “Our cadaverous countenances...with the ragged remains of clothes stuck about our sun-burnt bodies, must have produced an appearance affecting and revolting in the highest degree.”

Five days later, Pollard and the only other survivor in his boat, Charles Ramsdale, were rescued by the Nantucket whaleship the Dauphin. It was claimed they were, “found sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with”. They too were taken back to Valparaiso, from where a ship was sent to rescue the three men from Henderson Island. They’d managed to survive on the scant water they’d found, fish, and a few birds.

Just eight of the Essex’s crew had survived. All went back to sea but, amazingly, Pollard was shipwrecked a second time and never took command of another ship, “for all will say I am an unlucky man”. Instead, he became a nightwatchman in Nantucket, wandering the island, haunted by his ordeal.

When a writer asked him about his experiences, Pollard replied, “I can tell you no more – my head is on fire at the recollection.” (A more macabre story also went around: that when asked if he’d known Owen Coffin, Pollard would answer, “Know him? Why, I et [sic] him!”)

Brendan Gleeson as Tom Nickerson, in a scene from the film, In the Heart of the Sea.Credit:
Jonathan Prime

Chase too was a guilt-ridden man. His ghostwritten account was published in an attempt to capitalise on the story – or, perhaps, to set aright the more sensationalist versions. Later, Thomas Nickerson, the 14-year-old cabin boy, produced his own account, claiming they had not eaten Cole. Perhaps he sought to erase the memory by denial.

Chase could not forget, however. As he aged, he stored supplies of food in his attic, as if he believed he might once more face starvation – and that terrible dilemma. Plagued by headaches, he would cry, “Oh my head, my head”, and by the time he died in 1869 he had been declared insane.

Today the island of Nantucket is a quiet, reserved place. The whalers have long since left its cobbled streets, though the mansions that the shipowners built from their bloody profits still stand. Their blank, silent windows look out to sea, testament to the extraordinary horrors that those men of the Essex suffered, out on the infinite deep.